Blockchain Papers

Sushant Nagpal

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark M. Lennon, Daniel Folkinshteyn

Over the past 15 years, NASDAQ, the world’s first all-electronic stock exchange, has actively engaged in efforts to serve the global digital economy by expanding its reach beyond its original domestic U.S. market. They have attempted to create a global 24/7 trading platform, to serve customers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. These efforts have met with varying degrees of success. More recently, the renamed NASDAQ OMX Group has been experimenting with the disruptive fintech (financial technology) Bitcoin and its underlying technology blockchain to develop robust trading solutions, which drastically reduce transaction and record keeping costs. In this paper we analyze the various approaches taken by NASDAQ in its expansion ventures. We describe the similarities and differences in these undertakings, in order to identify successful strategies for firms who desire to increase the quality of their products while increasing efficiency and reducing the costs of their services. Drawing upon the strategy literature, we also develop theoretical models on how markets operate, and derive a series of propositions about the interplay between technology and markets.

John Flood, Lachlan Robb

No abstract is available for this record.

Syeda Sumbul Hossain, Samen Anjum Arani, Md. Tanvir Rahman, Touhid Bhuiyan · 6 authors

In every nation, democratic elections are a momentous and weighty occurrence, and the voting system that is now in place requires the use of ballots or electronic voting machines (EVM). Transparency, poor turnout, vote manipulation, distrust of electoral organizations, fabrication of unique IDs (voting party IDs), and delays in posting results are some of the issues that arise as a result of these procedures. The matter of safety is of the utmost importance. When considering the installation of a computerized voting system, voter confidentiality has always been one of the most important concerns. There is no question regarding the system's capability to secure itself in contrast to prospective assaults and safeguard data in the face of such big choices. Utilization of blockchain technology is one approach that might be taken to resolve security concerns. The blockchain technology has an endless number of different uses that might be implemented. The technology known as blockchain is a distributed ledger that makes it possible for peer-to-peer networks all over the world to handle digital assets. In this context, distributed ledger technology represents an intriguing development. A grouping of all transactions is referred to as a block. Immutability, decentralisation, security, transparency, and anonymity are some of the outstanding properties offered by blockchain technology. The combination of blockchain technology with smart contracts has shown promise as a viable option for the development of trustworthy and open-source electronic voting systems. In this article, we demonstrate how to use blockchain technology with the help of a wallet and the Solidity programming language to build an electronic voting application. The programme was designed as a smart contract for the Ethereum network. In order to avoid having the same person vote twice, the user's wallet will only hold a certain number of tokens (gas), which will be depleted each time the user casts a vote. This article talks about the pros and cons of using blockchain technology. It also shows a practical solution in the form of a web app for voting and analyses its limits.

Michèle Ruta, Floriano Scioscia, Saverio Ieva, Giovanna Capurso · 5 authors

Generally scarce computational and memory resource availability is a well known problem for the IoT, whose intrinsic volatility makes complex applications unfeasible. Noteworthy efforts in overcoming unpredictability (particularly in case of large dimensions) are the ones integrating Knowledge Representation technologies to build the so-called Semantic Web of Things (SWoT). In spite of allowed advanced discovery features, transactions in the SWoT still suffer from not viable trust management strategies. Given its intrinsic characteristics, blockchain technology appears as interesting from this perspective: a semantic resource/service discovery layer built upon a basic blockchain infrastructure gains a consensus validation. This paper proposes a novel Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on a semantic blockchain for registration, discovery, selection and payment. Such operations are implemented as smart contracts, allowing distributed execution and trust. Reported experiments early assess the sustainability of the proposal.

Yunsen Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Venkata Marella

Bitcoin is a social movement in the financial industry. It came into existence at a time when investors were looking for an alternative system for the traditional financial institutions. They wanted a system, which offers high transparency, low transaction fee, and high returns on their investment. Bitcoin is a decentralized system, which reveals all the transactions to the investors, providing a high degree of transparency. It operates without a centralized authority, so the transaction fee will be lower than the traditional financial institutions. The value of the Bitcoin can increase over a period and investors can expect high returns on their investment. As the market for the Bitcoin expanded, Bitcoin exchanges were formed, where investors can trade the fiat currencies for Bitcoins and vice versa. They became targets for the cyber criminals and lost bitcoins worth of millions of dollars in cyber-attacks, diminishing the value of Bitcoin. There is a lack of transparency in disclosing the details of the cyber-attacks to their customers by the exchanges. Bitcoin is failing to provide a solution for these issues and is operating like a traditional financial institution. In this paper, we will discuss how Bitcoin is a social movement using framing theory, examine various kinds of cyber-attacks that occurred on Bitcoin exchanges, their impact on Bitcoin, and make suggestions for the Bitcoin community to continue as a social movement in the financial industry.

Maria Letizia Perugini

Italian Abstract: Questo studio si propone di analizzare il complesso delle novità introdotte al sistema dei pagamenti e al trasferimento di diritti da Distributed Ledger e Blockchain, in una prospettiva che tenga conto delle applicazioni di mercato di queste innovazioni tecnologiche e della tutela giuridica degli interessi economici e delle posizioni soggettive che ne derivano. In particolar modo, l’opera vuole stimolare la discussione volta alla definizione di un quadro normativo socialmente adeguato che sostenga l’efficienza di questi strumenti in un’ottica di scambio economico globalizzato. English Abstract: This essay aims at analyzing the ensemble of innovation introduced by Distributed Ledger and Blockchain to the payment system and the transfer of rights, in a perspective considering the market applications of these new technologies and the legal protection of deriving economics interests and individual rights. Purposely, our dissertation aspires to encourage the discussion for the definition of a socially adequate legal framework sustaining the efficiency of these instruments in a global exchange perspective.

Jorge Bernal Bernabé, José L. Hernández-Ramos, Antonio Skármeta

Security and privacy concerns are becoming an important barrier for large scale adoption and deployment of the Internet of Things. To address this issue, the identity management system defined herein provides a novel holistic and privacy-preserving solution aiming to cope with heterogeneous scenarios that requires both traditional online access control and authentication, along with claim-based approach for M2M (machine to machine) interactions required in IoT. It combines a cryptographic approach for claim-based authentication using the Idemix anonymous credential system, together with classic IdM mechanisms by relying on the FIWARE IdM (Keyrock). This symbiosis endows the IdM system with advanced features such as privacy-preserving, minimal disclosure, zero-knowledge proofs, unlikability, confidentiality, pseudonymity, strong authentication, user consent, and offline M2M transactions. The IdM system has been specially tailored for the Internet of Things bearing in mind the management of both users’ and smart objects’ identity. Moreover, the IdM system has been successfully implemented, deployed, and tested in the scope of SocIoTal European research project.

Dominik Harz

Blockchains address trust through cryptography and consensus. Bitcoin is the first digital currency without trusted agents. Ethereum extends this technology by enabling agents on a blockchain, via smart contracts. However, a systemic trust model for smart contracts in blockchains is missing. This thesis describes the ecosystem of smart contracts as an open multi-agent system. A trust model introduces social control through deposits and review agents. Trust-related attributes are quantified in 2,561 smart contracts from GitHub. Smart contracts employ a mean of three variables and functions and one in ten has a security-related issue. Moreover, blockchains restrict computation tasks. Resolving these restrictions while maintaining trust requires verifiable computation. An algorithm for verifiable computation is developed and implemented in Solidity. It uses an arbiter enforcing the algorithm, computation services providing and verifying solutions, and a judge assessing solutions. Experiments are performed with 1000 iterations for one to six verifiers with a cheater prior probability of 30%, 50%, and 70%. The algorithm shows linear complexity for integer multiplication. The verification depends on cheater prior probability and amount of verifiers. In the experiments, six verifiers are sufficient to detect all cheaters for the three prior probabilities.

Robert Leonhard

No abstract is available for this record.

Anastasia Olegovna Barinova, Sergey Zapechnikov

Currently, business processes become more and more complicated. Data used in these processes circulates mainly through the digital communications. Due to these conditions some kind of electronic contracts for business deals becomes necessary. Smart contracts should describe a set of conditions, implemented through some events in the real world and digital systems. The most important requirement for this technology is privacy ensuring. In this work we have explored existing projects of privacy-preserving smart contracts, defined comparison criteria, compared projects and made a conclusion about options required for smart contract frameworks.

Efpraxia D. Zamani, Ioannis Babatsikos

In 2008, following the outbreak of the global financial crisis, a new trading system emerged that was made possible by cryptographically-produced currencies. Among them, the most popular digital cryptocurrency is undoubtedly the Bitcoin. This alternative way of trading quickly captured the interest of both businesses and consumers. Combined with a general lack of confidence towards financial institutions, central governments, and the effect of capital controls imposed across several countries, Bitcoins begun being used extensively for funds transfer across borders and general payments. However, it is unclear whether the use of Bitcoins is extensive enough so as to lead to complete or partial disintermediation of monetary transactions, and whether users understand how the technology works and what are the inherit risks of this alternative payment mechanism. This paper addresses these questions through a survey-based study, conducted within the Greek context, where capital controls are still active and awareness regarding cryptocurrencies seems to be on the rise. Our findings show that despite that end-users of Bitcoin are somewhat concerned with regards to security issues, they are nevertheless interested in its use for identifying new business opportunities and bypassing residencybased measures, such as capital controls.

Alessandro Piccolo

This master thesis explores how blockchain technologies can be utilized within the financial sector with focus on how to store both private and public information on the blockchain. The capital market is looking into ways of cutting down administrative work through streamlining the financial process by using blockchain technologies. Public key encryption together with hash functions and a consensus mechanism make up the basis for creating a shared trustless database system. The thesis was conducted by extensive research concerning cryptographic topics, and a literature study was made to compare existing solutions. This was done in order to come up with a new design which suggests how to utilize blockchain technologies in order to create private transactions. The design solves issues regarding key management and how to handle both private and public information on the blockchain. The proposed design is an extension of Visigon's existing permissioned blockchain, and it introduces different roles within the peer to peer network as well as a concept of having regulating nodes that together with the involved bank's nodes handle the process of private transactions. Private transactions are encrypted by using symmetric keys and thereafter recorded on the blockchain. In conclusion blockchain technology might not be the most suitable database system for banks to keep transactions private. Future solutions should consider the best attributes of blockchain technologies and create a new system with the single purpose of being a tool for the financial market.

Ethan Kane

No abstract is available for this record.

A Outchakoucht H Es-Samaali, Nn Van, R Nakagawa S Kodama

No abstract is available for this record.

Nicolas Herbaut, Nicolas Negru

The constant rise of over-the-top video consumption nowadays challenges the current Internet architecture. In this article, we propose a user-centric approach that helps the necessary reshaping of the content delivery ecosystem. We study how blockchain-powered smart contracts and network service chaining can be exploited to support such novel collaboration schemes. Finally, our findings suggest that the proposed solution can complement existing technologies by supporting a wide range of business cases while at the same time significantly reducing costs.

Lockheed Martin, Dallas, TX, USA, Jeff Daniel, Arman Sargolzaei, Mohammed Abdelghani · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Marc Sel, Henning Diedrich, Sander Demeester, Harald Stieber

This paper explains the main features of and motivation for the “report once” demonstrator1 shown at the 2017 Data For Policy conference. It shows how Ethereum2 smart contracts, based on the semantics and algorithmic representations defined in ACTUS3 can implement “digital doppelgängers” of financial contracts. <br> <br> The implementation makes use of a private4 Ethereum blockchain, with smart contracts written in Solidity.5 The limitations of using ACTUS in a semi real-time scenario are explored, as well as how to overcome these limitations. <br> <br> The major innovation, visualized by the demonstrator, is that compliance reports can be generated in semi realtime, using the information present in the “digital doppelgängers”, residing in the blockchain. <br> <br> The demonstrator supports various use cases, illustrated through the narration of stories. In these stories, Alice, Bob and Eve are contracting parties, Romeo acts as regulator, and the narrator tells the stories. The stories cover trading a Bond, trading an Interest Rate Swap (IRS), the defaulting of a party (i.e. a payment stop), and various types of regulatory reports. <br>

Antonio T. F. Lou, Eldon Y. Li

Financial technology (FinTech) is the new business model and technology which aims to compete with traditional financial services and blockchain is one of most famous technology use of FinTech. Blockchain is a type of distributed, electronic database (ledger) which can hold any information (e.g. records, events, transactions) and can set rules on how this information is updated. The most well-known application of blockchain is bitcoin, which is a kind of cryptocurrencies. But it can also be used in many other financial and commercial applications. A prominent example is smart contracts, for instance as offered in Ethereum. A contract can execute a transfer when certain events happen, such as payment of a security deposit, while the correct execution is enforced by the consensus protocol. The purpose of this paper is to explore the research and application landscape of blockchain technology acceptance by following a more comprehensive approach to address blockchain technology adoption. This research is to propose a unified model integrating Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) model and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to investigate continuance intention to adopt blockchain technology.

Chris Reed, Uma M Sathyanarayan, Shuhui Ruan, Justine K. Collins

Blockchain technology allows the creation of distributed ledgers. These distribute control among the players rather than requiring a centralized database, and so can reduce costs and speed-up transactions. However, when it is used for assets which exist outside the blockchain itself, an unmodified adoption of the technology would bypass legal and regulatory requirements which, for these kinds of assets, cannot be bypassed without fundamental change to the law. Building those requirements into any blockchain-based system introduces features which are not necessary for performing its core functions, and we call these ‘legal impurities’. The most important legal impurities required are those relating to identification of the parties, and introducing the ability of a trusted third party to make modifications to the ledger. Not only does introducing these legal impurities make fundamental changes to the concept behind blockchain, but it is also essential that they are implemented in ways which do not threaten the integrity of the blockchain as evidence. This article has been produced by members of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre, a collaboration between the Cloud Legal Project, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London and the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The authors are grateful to members of the MCCRC team and to attendees at the fourth Annual MCCRC Symposium (Windsor, September 2017) for helpful comments and to Microsoft for the generous financial support that has made this project possible. Responsibility for views expressed, however, remain with the authors.

Peng Xie, Hailiang Chen, Yu Jeffrey Hu

No abstract is available for this record.

Nicolas T. Courtois, Rebekah Mercer

Bitcoin is an open source payment system with a market capitalization of about 15 G$. During the years several key management solutions have been proposed to enhance bitcoin. The common characteristic of these techniques is that they allow to derive public keys independently of the private keys, and that these keys match. In this paper we overview the historical development of such techniques, specify and compare all major variants proposed or used in practical systems. We show that such techniques can be designed based on 2 distinct ECC arithmetic properties and how to combine both. A major trend in blockchain systems is to use by Stealth Address (SA) techniques to make different payments made to the same payee unlikable. We review all known SA techniques and show that early variants are less secure. Finally we propose a new SA method which is more robust against leakage and against various attacks.

Sarah Meiklejohn, Rebekah Mercer

Cryptocurrencies allow users to securely transfer money without relying on a trusted intermediary,&#13;\nand the transparency of their underlying ledgers also enables public verifiability. This openness,&#13;\nhowever, comes at a cost to privacy, as even though the pseudonyms users go by are not linked to their&#13;\nreal-world identities, all movement of money among these pseudonyms is traceable. In this paper,&#13;\nwe present M¨obius, an Ethereum-based tumbler or mixing service. M¨obius achieves strong notions of&#13;\nanonymity, as even malicious senders cannot identify which pseudonyms belong to the recipients to&#13;\nwhom they sent money, and is able to resist denial-of-service attacks. It also achieves a much lower&#13;\noff-chain communication complexity than all existing tumblers, with senders and recipients needing&#13;\nto send only two initial messages in order to engage in an arbitrary number of transactions.